World Rally Fever: Born on the Road (PC)

 It's very clear that the developers of World Rally Fever loved arcade racing games, especially those of the sprite scaling variety made by SEGA's AM2. They've really gone all the way into capturing the aesthetic of a Japanese arcade game of the late eighties or early nineties, even down to a nice Neogeo-esque intro before the title screen. The game was itself developed in Belgium, so it can go alongside the various works of Gaelco as being a European love letter to Japanese arcades. There's even a character who looks just like Joe from Tsukai GANGAN Koshinkyoku, and another who looks like Cheng Sinzan from the Fatal Fury series!

 

As well as their tributary nature, the graphics are just genuinely amazing. I'm not sure if they're actually using sprite scaling, or actual 3D polygons with pixel art textures designed to look like sprite scaling, but they look incredible either way. In a time when so many developers were making primitive attempts at photorealism using technology that couldn't hope to offer it, this game decided to push the aesthetic concepts of previous years to new heights. Such a shame that they did it in a game stuck on the PC, in a time when people playing PC games seemed to be even more "proud" of how their games were so much more sophisticated and boring than silly lowbrow arcade games. I wonder why it never got released on Playstation or Saturn, actually: Team17 were releasing games on those systems.

 

It's all slightly academic in the end, though, since as nice as the game looks, it's unfortunately not very enjoyable to play. Though the characters do handle differently, it feels like all of them take ages to accelerate to a decent speed. Which is something you'll definitely notice, as there are a lot of obstacles that will just bring you to a dead stop if you so much as scrape against them. Furthermore, something that's happened to me multiple times is crashing into the roadside barrier, clipping through it, getting stuck on the other side, then having to repeatedly crash into it to gradually clip back onto the road. There's a jump button (and on some stages, obstacles that go across the entire width of the road, necessitating its use), but you need to build up speed to actually put it to use, and in the off-road hinterlands, that's impossible.

 

These couple of flaws, along with the fact that the game never really feels like you're going particularly fast, even at full speed, are unfortunately gamekillers. It really is a shame, too, as this is a beautiful game, aestheticlly speaking. It just doesn't live up to that mechanically.